Skip to content

Recommend to prioritize domain-specific approvals

Fabio Pitino requested to merge docs/prioritize-domain-approvals into master

What does this MR do and why?

Related to Document to prioritize domain-specific approvals (#411560 - closed)

Problem

The review roulette provides suggestions in the MR via Danger bot. See an example here !119962 (comment 1381754635). It recommends a backend maintainer and also a different Verify maintainer.

In many cases if the Verify maintainer approves the MR, it may cover the backend approval since it's approved by a maintainer already. If the more generic backend approval is requested first, it may not be sufficient for Verify changes since these are domain-specific.

Details

CODEOWNERS sections represent parallel approvals. For example: backend section and Verify section are 2 independent approval sets. This MR !119962 (diffs) only changes Verify backend files. Still the approvals widget shows both backend and Verify although Verify approval is in theory sufficient (for backend code only). If you modify a file outside of the backend section, you will need approval for a different section, even if the author is a maintainer and they could merge the MR.

The change

In this MR we are modifying our docs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/code_review.html#domain-experts recommending that seeking domain-specific approvals before the generic maintainer approval can result in a more efficient code review cycle.

MR acceptance checklist

This checklist encourages us to confirm any changes have been analyzed to reduce risks in quality, performance, reliability, security, and maintainability.

Merge request reports